Evanoff: A gleaming city is growing on the bones of old Memphis

October 1, 2015 - A horse drawn carriage travels on Main Street in the Pinch District. The city of Memphis has hired an architect to revisit a mothballed plan for redevelopment of the Pinch district, with an eye toward supporting nearby anchors St. Jude and the Bass Pro Pyramid. (Nikki Boertman/The Commercial Appeal)(Photo: The Commercial Appeal)Buy Photo

A sign has been bolted to a post outside the little neighborhood grocery store he owns.

The sign is the calling card. It advertises cheeseburgers cooked inside M&R Grocery and Deli. This year’s price: $2.39.

“I want to give people a reason to stop by,” he said.

M&R Grocery stands on the continental divide between new and old, the gleaming city growing up on the bones of old Memphis, the place of miserable poverty, vanished blue-collar work and the lingering thought that not much has gone right since 1968.

Six blocks beyond M&R begins the Medical District, 17,000 employees and $1.5 billion in new investment coming, in addition to the $1.5 billion spent over the last decade.

In the 21st Century, no area in the city has had this much capital invested. And to the west are the new lofts and apartments for 12,000 upscale city dwellers, and the fashionable restaurants, bars, galleries and museums that have made Downtown a flourishing destination Memphians once again are proud to show off.

The old city that grew up on cotton and basic hospital chores and manufacturing is giving way to science and medicine, tourism and entertainment, though when you look outside Wesson’s store at 337 East St. what you see is the continental divide.

If the construction in the Medical District spills over to the old blocks near M&R, brings clinics and doctor’s offices, he might price his sandwiches like the $6.15 Huey’s World Famous burger or the $10 Belly Acres’ Southern Gentleman.

For now though, M&R’s cheeseburger is a loss leader, meant to lure clientele from Union Avenue's fastfood strip, bring them in to see the hot trays of pork chops, fried chicken and green beans.

He senses the new city over the horizon.

“We might see some of those doctors over here one of these days,” Wesson said.

Doctors dining in the M&R? Don't laugh. The city is changing.

It is rare to have in the same room Chase Carlisle, Andy Cates and Richard Shadyac, though on Tuesday they’ll take seats at the same table and speak about their ideas for the city going forward.

They are part of the new city. They have the wherewithal to reshape how Memphians, particularly the generation now in their 20s and 30s, think of their town.

Nearly everyone here knows of Billy Dunavant, Pitt Hyde and Fred Smith, prominent, wealthy and now aging entrepreneurs. They have been long regarded as part of the community-minded inner circle steering Memphis. Now a new generation has backed ventures such as the massive renovation of Sears Crosstown, Broad Avenue’s revival and the Tennessee Brewery renaissance on South Main.

New Memphis Institute, which has groomed about 10,000 people over three decades in civic leadership, will bring together Carlyle, Cates and Shadyac on a panel as part of its “Celebrate What’s Right in Memphis” series. The 90-minute luncheon will begin at noon in the Holiday Inn hotel at 3700 Central Avenue. Tickets cost $30.

“It is a very special time in our history of the city as it relates to the physicality, the geography of the city,”’ said New Memphis Institute chief executive Nancy Coffee, noting the spate of new construction

American cities always have renovated or razed old buildings and put up new structures. What’s striking about Memphis, where the riverfront skyline has hardly changed in a generation, is that so much is happening now — Bass Pro at The Pyramid, Beale Street Landing, the Orpheum’s Halloran Centre, Overton Square’s revival, Graceland's big hotel, the South Bluffs’ overhaul.

Carlisle’s firm, Carlisle Corp., has proposed One Beale, a 30-story riverside apartment tower and possible separate office building. Cates, head of RVC Outdoor Destinations, had a hand in the $200 million Crosstown project and has proposed redeveloping Mud Island. Shadyac is chief executive of ALSAC, the fund-raiser for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, which has committed to a $1 billion expansion in the Medical District and, nearby, is considering redevelopment of the Pinch District next to Bass Pro.

Coffee compares each of these projects to a story and notes, “These are stories that need to be told.” She adds: “We know a city grows best when it grows from its assets.”

She’s right. Since 2010, more than $5 billion has been invested in Greater Memphis offices, factories, distribution centers, hotels, restaurants and tourism activities.

Memphis has grown from its assets. It is probably the largest capital investment in the shortest period ever in the metro area. But confidence isn’t strong in every quarter of the city.

Memphis advertising executive Howard Robertson calls one of the “quiet idiosyncrasies” of the city its low self esteem.

“It has been an issue for us since April 4, 1968,” he said, referring to Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in Memphis. “It’s deep. For a great many of us we overlook the extraordinary talent potential and the cache that we have and are known for in other places around the world.”

The esteem ties into the city’s obsessions — reduce crime, relieve poverty, improve schools. It is almost as if two films are playing, one about the new city, the other about the old town, and both are true.

Clearly the narrative Memphians know best is echoed by the Memphis Grizzlies, the NBA franchise that markets itself as “grit and grind.” Memphians love the phrase.

“Nothing comes easy for us. We’ve got, as my daddy use to say, we’ve got to scuffle for everything,” Robertson said. “It’s part of the personality of this city. (Grizzlies player) Tony Allen encapsulated it perfectly in two words when he said the team was about ‘grit and grind.’ This team is a reflection of our city.’’

Now a new generation is emerging, putting Memphis at a crossroads — building a new city while still solving crime, poverty and education. It is too early to say when, or if, the obsessions will fade and the new story completely replaces the old tale of grit and grind.

What is clear is how difficult it is to eradicate entrenched poverty. Atlanta was hailed for a generation as a sterling Southern metropolis. Nashville is lauded now for economic growth.

Yet in 2010, 40.5 percent of Atlanta households were classified as low income, just ahead of metro Nashville at 39.8 percent and metro Memphis at 40.4 percent.

He and his wife Mattie opened M&R Grocery and Deli — the letters are from their first names — in August 1986.

These days, commuters are the mainstays, though this was not always so. The store sits between Crump and Union in a residential neighborhood, a crossroads between Downtown, Midtown and the Medical District. He remembers ordering $4,000 to $6,000 worth of groceries every week.

“Back when we started if it wasn’t a name brand they didn’t want it,” Wesson said. “They wanted Nabisco, Sealtest milk, Ritz crackers.’’

Then came the shift. He’s not sure why, but patterns changed after 2001.

“Groceries just started staying on the shelves,” Wesson said. “It was a tremendous drop in my sales. We went from selling more groceries to selling more hot food.”

Probably the most significant change occurred nearby. It is not clear this changed his business, but on the far side of busy Crump Avenue land was cleared for University Place, the 48-acre housing project visible from Interstate 240. It was financed by the Memphis Housing Authority using $22.5 million worth of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Hope VI grants.

Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton lauded the project in 2004, speaking at the press conference marking the beginning of University Place’s first phase of 400 homes.

“The downtown renaissance is really the envy of many cities across America,” Herenton said back then. “But what’s a quiet secret is we’re also transforming neighborhoods, bringing vibrance, enhancing the economy and the whole quality of life.”

Nearly 12 years after Herenton spoke, Downtown has improved. University Place looks new even today, but across the street are an abandoned church and a closed arthritis clinic that lead into interior blocks of empty shotgun houses, boarded storefronts, the closed Vance Middle School, stable older houses, a smattering of new apartments and a handful of enduring enterprises including Leland Sowell’s Frame and Alignment, NexAir industrial gas, AmeriPride laundry, Advance Memphis and the MIFA food bank complex. Wesson remembers the area once seemed more vibrant.

“I used to have a crowd at 10, at 11, 11:30, and again at 12,” Wesson said. “Twelve was the biggest lunch crowd. We used to have a lot more jobs around here. We were rolling. We had a paper bag company. We had a wooden pallet plant. We had a furniture company. We had NAPA (auto parts warehouse). NAPA had 400, 500 jobs in there, I think. We had the mattress business. They moved to Batesville.”

As blue-collar jobs disappeared — Greater Memphis has shed almost 25,000 industrial jobs since M&R opened — the Wessons adjusted. They stocked generic items, cut prices. “We put a lot of things on sale, like the cheeseburgers,” he said.

Despite the discounted prices, the numbers on M&R’s cheeseburger sign — the calling card — have climbed every year, rising more than 40 percent since summer 2011, due in part to the drought in Western states driving up beef and vegetable prices. At the same time, median household income in the Memphis city limits fell. A typical family living in the city earned $37,100 in 2014 -- 12 percent less than the $42,000 prevailing in 2000.

“We’ve never been able to get sales back to where they were,” the grocer said. “But we’re still holding on.”

In a city that prizes its Grizzlies, Roy Wesson exemplifies grit and grind.

Ted Evanoff, business editor of The Commercial Appeal, can be reached at evanoff@commercialappeal.com and (901) 529-2292.

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